![]() She has been observing Io’s atmosphere for 30 years with radio telescopes like ALMA and optical and infrared telescopes, primarily the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. With no nearby satellite currently observing the moon - NASA’s Juno mission focuses primarily on Jupiter and will end next July - astronomers like de Pater must rely on Earth-based telescopes to probe the atmosphere. And since we’re unable to probe inside Io, the atmosphere - about a billion times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere - provides a window into the moon’s roiling interior and the internal magma reservoirs feeding the volcanoes. “Is it volcanic activity, or gas that sublimates from the icy surface when Io is in sunlight? What we show is that, actually, volcanoes do have a large impact on the atmosphere.“Īs the most volcanically active moon in our solar system, Io provides a laboratory for exotic environments unlike anything on Earth. “It was not known which process drives the dynamics in Io’s atmosphere,” said de Pater, who is a Professor of the Graduate School in the departments of astronomy and of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley. New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, led by astronomer Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, partially resolve that question. Until now, however, it has been unclear whether volcanoes spewing hot sulfur dioxide (SO 2) are the main contributors to the atmosphere, or whether the main component is the accumulated cold SO 2, much of which is frozen on the surface, but in sunlight evaporates or sublimates into the atmosphere. The atmosphere on Jupiter’s moon Io is a witches’ brew, composed primarily of the sulfurous exhalations of more than 400 volcanoes that dot the surface. The observations for the first time show plumes of sulfur dioxide (yellow) rising up from Io’s volcanoes. ![]()
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